Microsoft Hybrid Cloud blogsite about Management

Category Archives: OMS

Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches breaks down the most important Azure concepts into bite-sized lessons with exercises and labs—along with project files available in GitHub—to reinforce your skills. Learn how to:
Use core Azure infrastructure and platform services—including how to choose which service for which task.
Plan appropriately for availability, scale, and security while considering cost and performance.
Integrate key technologies, including containers and Kubernetes, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the Internet of Things.

Multi-cluster view from Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor provides a multi-cluster view showing the health status of all monitored AKS clusters deployed across resource groups in your subscriptions. It shows AKS clusters discovered that are not monitored by the solution. Immediately you can understand cluster health, and from here you can drill down to the node and controller performance page, or navigate to see performance charts for the cluster. For AKS clusters discovered and identified as unmonitored, you can enable monitoring for that cluster at any time.

Container Live Logs provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:

Azure Monitor for VMs monitors your Azure virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets at scale. The service analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, monitoring their processes and their dependencies on other resources and external processes.
As a solution, Azure Monitor for VMs includes support for monitoring performance and application dependencies for VMs that are hosted on-premises or in another cloud provider. Three key features deliver in-depth insight:

Logical components of Azure VMs that run Windows and Linux: Are measured against pre-configured health criteria, and they alert you when the evaluated condition is met.

But what is coming in 2019 ?

Rocking with Azure in the Classroom !

I will continue every day sharing knowledge with the Community and continue my Free work on MVPbuzz Friday for Education to get Azure Cloud Technology in the Classroom for Teachers and Students.
The trend I see for 2019 is more Infrastructure and Security by Code with Microsoft Azure DevOps
and of course you have to be in Control with Microsoft Azure Monitor

I will write a blogpost in January 2019 about Microsoft Azure Hub-Spoke model by Enterprise Design 4 of 4: Optimize your Azure Workload.

More Items in 2019 to come :

Microsoft Azure Security Center for Hybrid IT

Windows Server 2019 in combination with Azure Cloud Services.

More on Containers in the Cloud

Azure Stack and ASDK

Integration with Azure Cloud.

API Management

Azure DevOps Pipelines and Collabration

Azure IoT for Smart Cities and Buildings combined with AI Technology

2019 will be a Great year again with New Microsoft Technologies and Features for your business.

Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.

What I really like is that you now can see the Container Live logs from the Azure portal and see what is going on in the background of a Container 🙂

Activate Azure Kubernetes Container Live Logs

Here you see the Container Live logs

This feature provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:

You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history :

Search on ssh

Azure Monitor for containers uses a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux. After initial deployment, there are routine or optional tasks you may need to perform during its lifecycle.
Because of this agent you can work with Log Analytics in Azure Monitor :

When you have your production workload running on Azure Kubernetes Clusters, It’s important to monitor to keep you in Control of the solution in Microsoft Azure and watch for improvements like performance for the business. With Container Live logs you can see what is going on in the Containers when you have issues and that’s great for troubleshooting to get your problem solved fast. Get your workload into Azure Containers and make your Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines in the Cloud.

Microsoft Azure Hub-Spoke Architecture

This Enterprise reference architecture shows how to implement a hub-spoke topology in Azure. The hub is a virtual network (VNet) in Azure that acts as a central point of connectivity to your on-premises network. The spokes are VNets that peer with the hub, and can be used to isolate workloads. Traffic flows between the on-premises datacenter and the hub through an ExpressRoute or VPN gateway connection.

We only use the Azure Private peering

For this Hybrid Cloud Strategy we made four Microsoft Azure Subscriptions via the EA Portal :

The naming convention rules and restrictions for Azure resources and a baseline set of recommendations for naming conventions. You can use these recommendations as a starting point for your own conventions specific to your needs.

The choice of a name for any resource in Microsoft Azure is important because:

It is difficult to change a name later.

Names must meet the requirements of their specific resource type.

Consistent naming conventions make resources easier to locate. They can also indicate the role of a resource in a solution.The key to success with naming conventions is establishing and following them across your applications and organizations.

Azure connectivity and RBAC Identity

This tenant is federated with via ADFS and Azure Connect to Office 365. Identity management is provisioned
via Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM2016). With this already in place, we can Configure Microsoft Azure RBAC in the subscriptions.

Access management for cloud resources is a critical function for any organization that is using the cloud. Role-based access control (RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.

RBAC is an authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management of resources in Azure.

Business Development

For Business Development we have a separated Active Directory in one forest and also federated via ADFS to Microsoft Office 365. For this environment we build one Azure subscription with a temporary Site-to-Site VPN connection to On-premises datacenter for the “Lift and Shift” migration via Azure-Site-Recovery (ASR)

S2S VPN IKE v2 tunnel with Cisco and Azure.

Azure Virtual Networks

Next step is to build the connections between the Azure HUB Subscription and the Azure Spoke subscription(s) when every Microsoft Azure subscription has It’s own Virtual Network (VNET). This is called VNET peering.

Virtual network peering enables you to seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks. Once peered, the virtual networks appear as one, for connectivity purposes. The traffic between virtual machines in the peered virtual networks is routed through the Microsoft backbone infrastructure, much like traffic is routed between virtual machines in the same virtual network, through private IP addresses only. Azure supports:

The VNET Peering between Azure HUB subscription and Spoke 1 is Connected.

In this order you have to make the other VNET Peerings from the Azure HUB subscription to the other Spoke Subscriptions so that the network connectivity between VNETs is working. Because we have the Azure Internet Edge in the HUB for the other subscriptions.

In the Azure Reference Architecture we also do Security by Design in the Cloud with Firewall and Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) and every Azure component get it’s own Tag for Security Groups and Billing – Usage.

Azure Storage

In every Microsoft Azure Subscription (HUB and Spoke ) we created a Storage Account. You can choose for different kind of storage in Microsoft Azure.

Durable and highly available. Redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. You can also opt to replicate data across datacenters or geographical regions for additional protection from local catastrophe or natural disaster. Data replicated in this way remains highly available in the event of an unexpected outage.Secure. All data written to Azure Storage is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data.Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications.Managed. Microsoft Azure handles maintenance and any critical problems for you.Accessible. Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides SDKs for Azure Storage in a variety of languages — .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and others — as well as a mature REST API. Azure Storage supports scripting in Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI. And the Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer offer easy visual solutions for working with your data.

Deploying Azure IaaS Virtual Machine with ARM Templates

Enterprise organizations with more then ten employees managing IT datacenters are working by process and order to do the job for the business. When they are all using the Azure Portal and deploy Virtual Machines manually you will get a mess and things can go wrong. In Microsoft Azure you have the Azure Resource Manager for deploying JSON ARM Templates. With these Azure Resource Manager Templates you can automate your workload deployments in Microsoft Azure. For example : We build a JSON template to deploy a Windows Server in the right Azure Subscription in the right Azure Resource Group and with the following extensions to it :

Using with our Azure naming conventions and Azure policy we always deploy consistent without making mistakes or by wrong typing in the Azure portal. When you write and make your ARM templates for different workloads, you can store them in Azure DevOps Repo ( Repository) and you can connect your private repo to GitHub.

Making ARM templates works really Awesome with Microsoft Visual Studio Code which is opensource and free of charge. You can add your favorite VSC extensions to work with like Azure Resource Manager.

Azure monitoring and Recovery Service Vault

To manage your Azure Hybrid Cloud environment you have to monitor everything to keep in control of your Virtual Datacenter. And of course you have to plan your business continuity with Azure Recovery Services (Backup) by Design. We made in every Azure Subscription an Azure Recovery Services Vault for making Backups. This is because you don’t want backup traffic over your VNET peering’s. In the Azure HUB subscription we made a second Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Vault for the “Lift & Shift” migration of On-premises Virtual Machines to the landing zone in Azure HUB.

With Microsoft Azure Monitor we use Log Analytics and Service maps and with the same OMS agent on the Virtual Machine, we still can use Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) connected to the same agent 🙂

When you have 45 locations, 45.000 students with BYOD and 10.000 Managed workstations, you will monitor 24 x 7 to keep everything running for your Business. Monitoring Express Route with a Backup connection is a must for your Hybrid Virtual Datacenter. Here you have more information about monitoring Express Route Circuit

Monitoring our Express Route

With this all installed in Microsoft Azure by Design, we have the policy Security First !

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